Friday, March 23, 2007

New Searchable Website with U.S. Newspapers, 1900-1910

"Manila has fallen, and so have our prices," is a quote in a January 27, 1900 story on the use of war rhetoric in advertising in The Colored American, a Washington D.C. newspaper. I found this with ease in a simple word search for "remember" and "Maine" on an extraordinary new website. It features newspapers from different parts of the country, from 1900 to 1910, and the site has an outstanding search feature that makes it especially valuable.

Here's the announcement with the details:

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS AND NEH LAUNCH DIGITAL NEWSPAPERS SITE

This week, the Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the Humanities unveiled their "Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers" joint venture which debuted on-line with more than 226,000 pages of public-domain newspapers from California, Florida, Kentucky, New York, Utah, Virginia and the District of Columbia published between 1900 and 1910. The fully-searchable site is available here.

"Chronicling America" is produced by the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP), a partnership between the NEH and the Library of Congress created to develop an Internet-based, searchable database of U.S. newspapers with select digitization of historic pages as well as information about newspapers from 1690 to the present. Supported by NEH's "We the People" program and Digital Humanities Initiative, the digital resource will continue to be developed and permanently maintained at the Library of Congress.

Over a period of approximately 20 years, NDNP will create a national, digital resource of historically significant newspapers published between 1836 and 1922 from all U.S. states and territories. Also on the Web site, an accompanying national newspaper directory of bibliographic and holdings information directs users to newspaper titles in all formats. The information in the directory was created through an earlier NEH initiative. The Library of Congress will also digitize and contribute to the NDNP database a significant number of newspaper pages drawn from its own collections during the course of this partnership. For the initial launch the Library of Congress contributed more than 90,000 pages from 14 different newspaper titles published in the District of Columbia between 1900 and 1910.